On the Casino Terrace
Grant Allen
[Chapter XVII from the book, Post-Prandial
Philosophy,
published 1894 in London by Chatto & Windus]
I have always regarded Monte Carlo as an Influence for Good. It helps
to keep so many young men off the Stock Exchange.
Let me guard against an obvious but unjust suspicion. These remarks
are not uttered under the exhilarating effect of winning at the
tables. Quite the contrary. It is the Bank that has broken the Man
to-day at Monte Carlo. They are rather due to the chastening and
thought-compelling influence of persistent loss, not altogether
unbalanced by a well-cooked lunch at perhaps the best restaurant in
any town of Europe. I have lost my little pile. The eight five-franc
pieces which I annually devote out of my scanty store to the tutelary
god of roulette have been snapped up, one after another, in breathless
haste, by the sphinx-like croupiers, impassive priests of that
rapacious deity, and now I am sitting, cleaned out, by the edge of the
terrace, on a brilliant, cloudless, February afternoon, looking across
the zoned and belted bay towards the beautiful grey hills of
Rocca-bruna and the gleaming white spit of Bordighera in the distance.
'Tis a modest tribute, my poor little forty francs. Surely the veriest
puritan, the oiliest Chadband of them all, will allow a humble
scribbler, at so cheap a yearly rate, to purchase wisdom, not unmixed
with tolerance, at the gilded shrine of Fors Fortuna!
For what a pother, after all, the unwise of this world are wont to
make about one stranded gambling-house, in a remote corner of Liguria!
If they were in earnest or sincere, how small a matter they would
think it! Of course, when I say so, hypocrisy holds up its hands in
holy horror. But that is the way with the purveyors of mint, cumin,
and anise; they raise a mighty hubbub over some unimportant detailin
order to feel their consciences clear when business compels them to
rob the widow and the orphan. In reality, though Monte Carlo is bad
enough in its waydo I not pay it unwilling tribute myself twice
a year out of the narrow resources of The Garret, Grub Street?it
is but a skin-deep surface symptom of a profound disease which attacks
the heart and core in London and Paris. Compared with Panama,
Argentines, British South Africans, and Liberators, Monte Carlo is a
mole on the left ankle.
"The Devil's advocate!" you say. Well, well, so be it. The
fact is, the supposed moral objection to gambling as such is a purely
commercial objection of a commercial nation; and the reason so much
importance is attached to it in certain places is because at that
particular vice men are likely to lose their money. It is largely a
fetish, like the sinfulness of cards, of dice, of billiards. Moreover,
the objection is only to the kind of gambling. There is another kind,
less open, at which you stand a better chance to win yourself, while
other parties stand a better chance to lose; and that kind, which is
played in great gambling-houses known as the Stock Exchange and the
Bourse, is considered, morally speaking, as quite innocuous. Large
fortunes are made at this other sort of gambling, which, of course,
sanctifies and almost canonises it. Indeed, if you will note, you will
find not only that the objection to gambling pure and simple is
commonest in the most commercial countries, but also that even there
it is commonest among the most commercial classes. The landed
aristocracy, the military, and the labouring men have no objection to
betting; nor have the Neapolitan lazzaroni, the Chinese coolies. It is
the respectable English counting-house that discourages the vice,
especially among the clerks, who are likely to make the till or the
cheque-book rectify the little failures of their flutter on the Derby.
Observe how artificial is the whole mild out-cry: how absolutely it
partakes of the nature of damning the sins you have no mind to! Here,
on the terrace where I sit, and where ladies in needlessly costly
robes are promenading up and down to exhibit their superfluous wealth
ostentatiously to one another, my ear is continuously assailed by the
constant ping, ping, ping of the pigeon-shooting, and my peace
disturbed by the flapping death-agonies of those miserable victims.
Yet how many times have you heard the tables at Monte Carlo denounced
to once or never that you have heard a word said of the poor mangled
pigeons? And why? Because nobody loses much money at pigeon-matches.
That is legitimate sport, about as good and as bad as pheasant or
partridge shootingno better, no worse, in spite of artificial
distinctions; and nobody (except the pigeons) has any interest in
denouncing it. Legend has it at Monte Carlo, indeed, that when the
proprietors of the Casino wished to take measures "pour attirer
les Anglais" they held counsel with the wise men whether it was
best to establish and endow an English church or a pigeon-shooting
tournament. And the church was in a minority. Since then, I have heard
more than one Anglican Bishop speak evil of the tables, but I have
never heard one of them say a good word yet for the boxed and
slaughtered pigeons.
Let me take a more striking because a less hackneyed caseone
that still fewer people would think of. Everybody who visits Monte
Carlo gets there, of course, by the P.L.M. If you know this coast at
all you will know that P.L.M. is the curt and universal abbreviation
for the Paris, Lyon, Méditerranée Railway Companyin
all probability the most gigantic and wickedest monopoly on the face
of this planet. Yet you never once heard a voice raised yet against
the company as a company. Individual complaints get into the Times, of
course, about the crowding of the train de luxe, the breach of faith
as to places, and the discomforts of the journey; but never a
glimmering conception seems to flit across the popular mind that here
is a Colossal Wrong, compared to which Monte Carlo is but as a
flea-bite to the Asiatic cholera. This chartered abuse connects the
three biggest towns in FranceParis, Lyon, Marseillesand is
absolutely without competitors. It can do as it likes; and it does it,
regardlessI say "regardless," without qualification,
because the P.L.M. regards nobody and nothing. Yet one hears of no
righteous indignation, no uprising of the people in their angry
thousands, no moral recognition of the monopoly as a Wicked Thing, to
be fought tooth and nail, without quarter given. It probably causes a
greater aggregate of human misery in a week than Monte Carlo in a
century. Besides, the one is compulsory, the other optional. You
needn't risk a louis on the tables unless you choose, but, like it or
lump it, if you're bound for Nice or Cannes or Mentone, you must open
your mouth and shut your eyes and see what P.L.M. will send you. Our
own railways, indeed, are by no means free from blame at the hands of
the Democracy: the South-Eastern has not earned the eternal gratitude
of its season-ticket holders; the children of the Great Western do not
rise up and call it blessed. (Except, indeed, in the most
uncomplimentary sense of blessing.) But the P.L.M. goes much further
than these; and I have always held that the one solid argument for
eternal punishment consists in the improbability that its Board of
Directors will be permitted to go scot-free for ever after all their
iniquities.
I am not wholly joking. I mean the best part of it. Great monopolies
that abuse their trust are far more dangerous enemies of public morals
than an honest gambling-house at every corner. Monte Carlo as it
stands is just a concentrated embodiment of all the evils of our
anti-social system, and the tables are by far the least serious among
them. It is an Influence for Good, because it mirrors our own world in
all its naked, all its over-draped hideousness. There it rears its
meretricious head, that gaudy Palace of Sin, appropriately decked in
its Haussmanesque architecture and its coquettish gardens, attracting
to itself all the idle, all the vicious, all the rich, all the
unworthy, from every corner of Europe and America. But Monte Carlo
didn't make them; it only gathers to its bosom its own chosen children
from the places where they are producedfrom London, Paris,
Brussels, New York, Berlin, St. Petersburg. The vices of our
organisation begot these over-rich folk, begot their diamond-decked
women, and their clipped French poodles with gold bangles spanning
their aristocratic legs. These are the spawn of land-owning, of
capitalism, of military domination, of High Finance, of all the social
ills that flesh is heir to. I feel as I pace the terrace in the broad
Mediterranean sunshine, that I am here in the midst of the very best
society Europe affords. That is to say, the very worst. The dukes and
the money-lenders, the Jay Goulds and the Reinachs. The idlest, the
cruellest: the hereditary drones, the successful blood-suckers. But to
find fault with them only for trying to win one another's ill-gotten
gold at a fair and open game of trente-et-quarante, with the odds
against them, and then to say nothing about the way they came by it,
is to make a needless fuss about a trifle of detail, while overlooking
the weightiest moral problems of humanity.
Whoever allows red herrings like these to be trailed across the path
of his moral consciousness, to the detriment of the scent which should
lead him straight on to the lairs of gigantic evils, deserves little
credit either for conscience or sagacity. My son, be wise. Strike at
the root of the evil. Let Monte Carlo go, but keep a stern eye on
London ground-rents.
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